A Consensus Protocol for e-Democracy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel consensus protocol tailored for e-Democracy that combines permission-based methods with trust graphs to ensure resilient, dynamic, and sybil-resistant decision-making in distributed ledgers.

Contribution

It proposes a new consensus protocol integrating permission-based protocols with trust graphs to support dynamic, resilient, and sybil-resistant e-Democracy systems.

Findings

Achieves consensus at each iteration among known agents.

Enables community growth while maintaining bounded byzantine nodes.

Supports dynamic updates of the agent list over time.

Abstract

Given that Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) are plutocratic, and other common consensus protocols are mostly permission-based, we look for a consensus protocol that will suit the needs of e-Democracy. In particular, what we need is a distributed ledger that will record and, to the possible extent, execute the public will. We propose a combination of any given permission-based protocol together with a trust graph between the nodes, which supplies the required permission for new nodes. As a result, the consensus protocol reaches consensus at every iteration between a known list of agents and then updates this list between iterations. This paper is based on prior work that shows the conditions under which a community can grow while maintaining a bounded number of byzantines. It combines a permission-based consensus protocol (such as pBFT) with a community expansion algorithm (such as the one in the prior work) to arrive at a consensus protocol in which the set of agents can change in time, while being sybil-resilient.